Cultural Tastes Research Articles

‘Disciplining the audience’: Audience experiences with MUBI

Through the case of MUBI, this article inquires into the changing audience habits with the proliferation of video-on-demand services and the discourse of control and choice, increased mobility, and democratic access. Drawing on in-depth interviews with subscribers of MUBI Turkey, this article explores the ways the audience relates to the imagined audience that MUBI assumes, promotes, and celebrates as a cultural gatekeeper and artistic patron/expert; and how, in turn, being a MUBI user becomes a sign of cultural taste. This study argues that even though users appreciate MUBI’s limited choice model compared to Netflix, they still experience feelings such as frustration, stress, and inadequacy. These feelings mainly result from MUBI’s artistic authority over them, established through the discourse of expertise/artistic patronage and limited-time model. On the other hand, users do not automatically accept the service’s expertise. Some are more critical of it than other VOD services (such as Netflix) because they consider watching MUBI a form of ‘intellectual labor’. Even though MUBI discursively maintains the long-standing dichotomies of niche-mainstream, arthouse-popular cinema, or high-lowbrow culture, the users experience these dichotomies more complexly according to their multiple subject positions.

A Changing Representation: “Personal Writing” in Artistic Intervention in Chinese Rural Communities

As socially engaged art has played a vibrant role in responding to the crisis of the postmodernist art regime, the current post-Occupy condition has manifested itself in artistic interventions in rural China. In contrast to social writing, which encompasses street art, designers going to the countryside, and industrial empowerment to construct “good cultural governance” or “good cultural taste,” the term personal writing as used here describes a type of avant-garde intervention that has sparked interest in vernacular communities. It provides a socially minded critique of art production as bifurcated from the remaking of everyday social relations and subjectivities, political and cultural possibilities, and the rural Chinese future. Grounded in a contextual analysis of the social turn in Chinese contemporary art and the lingering “rural problem” under post-socialism, this article takes artist Mao Chenyu's Paddy Film project as an example of personal writing and proposes this artist's activisms at Dongting Lake as a specific intervening field, visual ethnography as a method, paddy rice as a distinctive “thing,” and archival practices as a deconstructive pathway that together have promoted the emergence of a resistance narrative in artistic intervention in Chinese rural communities.

Cultural omnivorousness in Ukraine: Examining relationships with social indicators via literary preferences among readers

The ability to accumulate extensive tastes, which is known as cultural omnivorousness, can play a significant role in social stratification and marking social groups. The omnivore argument posits that higher-status cultural tastes tend to be broad and diverse (omnivore). In contrast, lower-status cultural tastes are limited and exclusive (univore). This study investigates cultural omnivorousness in Ukraine by (1) examining latent classes of audiences and (2) exploring the relationship between cultural omnivorousness and positions in the social structure, considering educational attainment, financial situation, age, gender and type of settlement. Relying on the data from the survey ‘Reading in the context of media consumption and life construction’ conducted in 2020, this study focuses on the breadth/volume of behavioral preferences in literary genres among readers in Ukraine (N = 1302). The latent class analysis presents evidence of the distinctiveness of the omnivore class. Subsequent regression analysis shows a strong positive association between high education and omnivorous taste, whereas the financial situation bears no significant direct effect. Regression coefficients for socio-demographic variables indicate a more omnivorous taste amongst women and residents of big cities. The study concludes by discussing potential limitations and further perspectives for investigating the relationships between cultural omnivorousness and social stratification.

Gentrification of Taste and Lifestyle: Shanghai as an Instagrammable Wanghong City

Gentrification parallels with massive demolition and displacement in Chinese cities in the post‐Reform era. The article studies the ways in which gentrification of cultural taste and lifestyle is played into state‐sponsored neoliberal space and class making. Focusing on Shanghai—China's gateway to modernity and leading Instagrammable Internet‐famous (wanghong) city—the article examines how the new Shanghai middle class becomes the patron of gentrification and how spatial consumption in the age of social media produces new forms of urban inauthenticity and social distinction. Through case studies of the transformation of two major historic Shanghai architectural forms—vernacular alleyway (longtang) houses and Western‐style garden villas (laoyangfang)—into wanghong scenes, the article argues that by “wanghongnizing” cities like Shanghai and gentrifying ordinary people's everyday life, the Chinese state strategically replaces collective memories of radical urbanism and displacement with propagation of an aestheticized middle‐class xiaokang society and romanticized “Chinese Dream.”

The geosemiotics of urban transnationalism: a case study of Vietnamese commercial landscapes in Prague

This study analyzes the discursive social position of Vietnamese migrants represented by three types of Vietnamese commercial places: a large wholesale complex, Vietnamese-run grocery shops on local streets, and stylish chain restaurants in commercial centers. Guided by the notions of semiotic landscapes and geosemiotics, this study analyzes the semiotic dynamic among the spatial structures, visual images, and human activities in and around the study sites. The analysis demonstrates that the spatial representations of Vietnamese in Prague are associated with the spatial-visual discourses of the globalized city. The walled wholesale complex, situated on the margin of the city, serves to discursively segregate the diasporic community from the mainstream society. Ubiquitous grocery stores on local streets paradoxically signify the inconspicuousness of Vietnamese in Czech society. On the other hand, stylish Vietnamese restaurants in commercial centers add sophisticated cultural tastes and are included in the cosmopolitan dynamic of Prague. This geosemiotic study illustrates how geographical centrality and marginality are intertwined with migrants’ commercial practices, reflecting their multilayered positions in the socioeconomic strata of society. In transnational urban spaces, understanding the discursively associated ethnic markers and their urban locations provides important insights into the inclusive and exclusive dynamics of globalized cities.

An Investigation into the Relationship between Metaverse Usage Patterns and Cultural Tastes: A Study of Avatar Formation among Generation Z

An Investigation into the Relationship between Metaverse Usage Patterns and Cultural Tastes: A Study of Avatar Formation among Generation Z

Class Bias in Indonesian’s Post-Reformation Film Revival

This paper describes how the Indonesian film industry has experienced a revival to counter Hollywood dominance since the beginning of the Reformation Era in the 2000s. However, conditions that hinder the growth of the Indonesian film industry are mainly due to the concentration of movie theatres and film screens in big cities. Indonesian films are predominantly consumed by groups from the upper socioeconomic levels and ignored by the middle and lower economic strata. This article seeks to portray whether the movement against Hollywood dominance would be effective if Indonesian films were only directed at this particular audience segment. To analyse the development of the Indonesian film industry in the post-reformation era (2000-current), the authors used a nationwide survey from Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting, conducted from August 31 to September 9, 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 Pandemic hit globally. To corroborate the survey's findings, the authors also distributed a closed questionnaire to 100 students at Undergraduate Program in Communication, Universitas Indonesia, and followed this with in-depth interviews with several students. The authors seek to study the revival of Indonesian films despite the decade-long dominance of Hollywood films and, recently, South Korean films. The research question proposed in this paper is: Can Indonesia break away from Hollywood's dominance? For this reason, this research focuses on the availability and modality of Indonesian market-targeted millennial and post-millennial film audiences to support the revival of the national film industry to compete with the dominance of Hollywood films. Keywords: Class bias, Indonesian films’ revival, taste culture, movie theaters, Hollywood films.

The Role of Classical Music Public Services in Building Urban Cultural Soft Power: A Triple Model in China

Recent studies advocate expanding the concept of soft power from the nation to city context and emphasize the importance of culture in building urban soft power. The existing research neglects the role of classical music on urban cultural soft power and reflects the necessity to explore long-term musical projects that are beneficial to residents. By analyzing the case study of a classical-music-educational-based public services project, the Guangzhou Youth Symphony Orchestra (GYSO), this research finds that public cultural services can continuously improve urban cultural soft power through the triple model of “contractor-cultural policies-public participation”. This research argues that although the In Harmony and the EI Sistema projects are also public cultural services of classical music, the triple model of GYSO has multi-faceted impacts on urban development, including cultivating creative class, enhancing residents’ cultural tastes, promoting social cohesion, integrating cultural resources and establishing city branding. This triple mechanism is a model with Chinese characteristics that combines the arm’s length principle with the cultural exception policy.

Adolescents’ Music Tastes in the Streaming Era: The Case of Belgium

The sociological literature about music considers youth as a crucial period for the development of one’s music tastes and identity. Yet, scarce research has documented the taste profiles of adolescents and their composition in relation to identity characteristics, especially in the current streaming era. In this article, we integrate different strands of literature analyzing the role of music tastes in identity building to define and segment the composition of contemporary adolescents’ taste profiles. We employed data from a cross-sectional study among Belgian adolescents ( n = 533, Mage (SD) = 15.3 (1.6), 61.1% girls, 83.2% Western European) and used latent class analysis to derive their taste profiles. Multinomial logistic regression subsequently segmented the socio-cognitive, social, and digital characteristics of these profiles. Our findings contextualize adult taste profiles among adolescents and the streaming landscape, shedding light on cultural tastes as gendered technologies of self-presentation.

The Transformation of Educational Values via Cultural Offerings in the Context of Teacher Education

Education and culture are seen as key components of the learning process. In this context, discussions about the quality of education and approaches to strengthening educational values, as well as the importance of culture in the transmission of these values, are becoming increasingly relevant. However, in Latvia, studies regarding people who attend various cultural events do not focus on strengthening educational values or linking them to the cultural context. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore how educational values are linked to current trends in cultural offerings and how they are reflected in teacher education. The research methodology followed a qualitative and quantitative research paradigm and the specifics of interdisciplinary research. The data were obtained using surveys and focus group discussions. The overall strategy of the study is based on a holistic, multidisciplinary approach that takes the regional discourse in Latvia into account. The research results prove that cultural experiences have contributed to the development of most respondents’ personalities and emphasize the role of teachers in the transmission of educational values. The qualitative and educational content of cultural offerings promotes a culture of discussion, strengthens community consciousness, and shapes cultural taste.

Cultural Distinction and the University of Toronto: Constructing Symbolic Boundaries of Social Class in Canada, 1894–1950

In the first half of the twentieth century, the University of Toronto was a preeminent cultural institution in Canada. Based on a critical interpretation of archival documents, this article narrates the history of four non-formal educational programs through which the University of Toronto created opportunities for Canadians to develop privileged forms of cultural taste and practice: the administration of local examinations in music across Canada, the development of a museum oriented to public visitation, the organization of public lectures in collaboration with local associations across Ontario, and the delivery of non-credit evening courses in Toronto. These four programs engaged hundreds of thousands of Canadians in forms of activity that supported the development of what Bourdieu conceptualized as constellations of cultural distinction: arrays of tastes and practices that mark symbolic boundaries of social class. Two of the programs resulted in national cultural institutions (Royal Conservatory of Music and Royal Ontario Museum) prominent in fields that have been empirically associated with social class boundaries in Canada. The other two programs declined in significance after 1950 and have not previously been included in analyses of cultural distinction. This article explores the historical role of Canadian universities in constructing symbolic boundaries of social class.

Графічний дизайн в контексті культури смаків: освітньо-виховний потенціал

The article examines the place of graphic design in modern post-industrial society, extending beyond purely applied art and aspiring to play the role of an expert in the interiors of human existence, determining the social and cultural status of an individual. It is argued that graphic design, organically integrating into contexts and actively responding to the challenges of such a social-decorative phenomenon as fashion, plays a significant role in shaping taste culture. This attests to the multiplicity of ambivalent cultural manifestations of graphic design. Special attention is given to identifying the functional potential of graphic design in creating cross-cutting trends that, through non-verbal means of communication, can form and maintain social and cultural unity. In connection with this, an analysis of graphic design is carried out through the prism of philosophical communication, allowing the identification of graphic design as the most effective practice of nonverbal communication and information visualization in post-industrial society. It is determined that graphic design is capable not only of generating new meanings but also of creating communicative gaps. Given this specificity, the article particularly focuses on identifying the educational and upbringing potential of graphic design. It is demonstrated that the process of creating visual images and their subsequent interpretation by consumers of graphic information depends not only on the aesthetic taste, ethical beliefs, and humanistic orientation of the designer (visualizer) but also on their educational and upbringing potential. The necessity of strengthening humanistic orientations in modern Ukrainian design and art education is emphasized.

The importance of being privileged: Digital entrepreneurship as a class project

Abstract Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship has been proposed as a means by which people may emancipate themselves from societal constraints. We interrogate digital entrepreneurship’s meritocratic foundations by way of a 36-month ethnography of a startup incubator. Attending to the dispositions of digital entrepreneurs, we reveal they use cultural tastes and manners to create the incubator as a place where members of the privileged class can reinvent themselves at their leisure, all the while adopting the meritocratic mythologies of digital entrepreneurship to disavow their own privilege. This opens up a two-fold contribution to the study of professions and occupations. Firstly, we demonstrate how professional and occupational roles are epiphenomenal to class positioning. Secondly, the parallels between the legitimating discourses of entrepreneurs and more established professional jurisdictions attest to a community that is in the process of professionalization.

Disrupted routines anticipate musical exploration

Understanding and predicting the emergence and evolution of cultural tastes manifested in consumption patterns is of central interest to social scientists, analysts of culture, and purveyors of content. Prior research suggests that taste preferences relate to personality traits, values, shifts in mood, and immigration destination. Understanding everyday patterns of listening and the function music plays in life has remained elusive, however, despite speculation that musical nostalgia may compensate for local disruption. Using more than one hundred million streams of four million songs by tens of thousands of international listeners from a global music service, we show that breaches in personal routine are systematically associated with personal musical exploration. As people visited new cities and countries, their preferences diversified, converging toward their travel destinations. As people experienced the very different disruptions associated with COVID-19 lockdowns, their preferences diversified further. Personal explorations did not tend to veer toward the global listening average, but away from it, toward distinctive regional musical content. Exposure to novel music explored during periods of routine disruption showed a persistent influence on listeners' future consumption patterns. Across all of these settings, musical preference reflected rather than compensated for life's surprises, leaving a lasting legacy on tastes. We explore the relationship between these findings and global patterns of behavior and cultural consumption.

Literary tastes are as heritable as other human phenotypes: Evidence from twins' library borrowing.

Social science research argues that differences in individuals' literary and cultural tastes originate in social environments. Yet, it might be that these differences are partly associated with genetic differences between individuals. To address this possibility, we use nation-scale registry data on library borrowing among Danish twins (N = 67,900) to assess the heritability of literary tastes. We measure literary tastes via borrowing of books of different genres (e.g., crime and biographical novels) and formats (physical, digital, and audio) and decompose the total variance in literary tastes into components attributable to shared genes (heritability), shared environments (social environment shared by siblings), and unique environments (social environments not shared by siblings). We find that genetic differences account for 45-70 percent of the total variance in literary tastes, shared environments account for almost none of the variance, and unique environments account for a moderate share. These results suggest that literary tastes are approximately as heritable as other human phenotypes (e.g., physical traits, cognition, and health). Moreover, heritability is higher for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups than for advantaged groups. Overall, our results suggest that research should consider the role of genetic differences in accounting for individual differences in literary and broader cultural tastes.

Hipster Hospitality: Blurred Boundaries in Restaurants

The restaurant industry is currently experiencing a shift in taste judgements. Practices and discourses on taste are communicated and expressed in contexts where food enthusiasts meet, resulting in a complex debate about the production and consumption of “good and bad” taste. This study aims to explore the intricate dynamics that shape the performances of dining room professionals in contemporary restaurants. Based on autoethnographic fieldwork at two restaurants in Sweden, this study uses cultural taste and dramaturgical theory to understand the social processes in restaurant culture. The results demonstrate how dining room work is organized within an unstructured environment through organic service, aesthetical framing, and self-representation. Based on these findings, the article argues that the interplay between the restaurant’s ambiance and the self holds value in shaping specific hipster hospitality. For instance, this is achieved through the blurred line between frontstage and backstage. This study contributes to the understanding of the changing role of work in contemporary restaurant culture, in which a less pronounced distinction between private and public, and between formal and informal service are some of the elements.

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field.

Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.

Бальные традиции в суворовских военных училищах

The article proposes for discussion the problem of restoring the traditions of teaching dance to students of educational organizations of any type, in particular elementary schools, as well as holding dance meetings, evenings and balls in educational institutions. Using the example of the ballroom tradition, preserved as part of a large cultural and historical heritage in modern Suvorov military schools, the effectiveness of such events for the comprehensive development of a student’s personality, the formation of a culture of behavior, aesthetic taste, good manners, and courtesy in children and youth is proven.

“Work with us… to make it more accessible”. What women with intellectual disabilities want from infant-feeding health resources: an exploratory study

BackgroundMore women with intellectual disabilities are becoming mothers but fewer are known to breastfeed compared with other women. Women with intellectual disabilities are entitled to accessible antenatal and infant feeding information, yet are rarely asked for their views on available resources. This article reports on the final stage of a UK project exploring how women with intellectual disabilities are supported to make infant feeding decisions. The wider project includes a scoping review and interviews with healthcare professionals, here we focus on the voices of the women themselves.MethodsFour women with an intellectual disability participated in a focus group where they were asked to give their views on the accessibility of currently available infant feeding resources and on alternative representations of infant feeding. All were interested in women’s health issues, including infant feeding. Photo-elicitation was used to gather views on videos, bespoke ‘Easy Read’ material and several alternative representations of infant feeding. A transcription of the discussion was thematically analysed whilst a critical visual analysis was undertaken of the women’s preferred images/resources. The study took place in Bristol, UK, during 2022.ResultsTwo themes were identified from the group discussion: ‘The desire for choice’ and ‘How easy is ‘Easy Read’?’ The desire for choice was expressed in terms through agreements and disagreements about preferred imagery, differing tastes, and reasons for these preferences. We identified a challenge to ‘Easy Read’ as a default standard and concerns that some forms of ‘Easy Read’ can confuse rather than inform. Critical visual analysis identified the importance of the story and social setting of the preferred infant feeding image.ConclusionsFindings suggest a need for a suite of resources, avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach, including people with an intellectual disability at every stage of the design and production process. Resources should recognise and embrace differences in terms of understanding, visual literacy and cultural taste, as well as being freely available to support women with intellectual disabilities to make informed infant feeding decisions. An accessible film was co-produced, to disseminate the findings from all three stages of the completed project.

Truth and Reconciliation in Charleston, SC—Slavery Central

As a tourist destination dependent on its reputation for elegant architecture, fine dining, and good manners, Charleston, South Carolina regularly tops industry journal lists of “Best Cities” to visit both in the United States and internationally. The city’s place in atlases of world history is assured, however, not by virtue of its architecture, cuisine, or politeness but because it was the single most important port in continental North America for the importation of enslaved Africans. The paradoxical coexistence of these two factors illustrates Simon Gikandi’s thesis in Slavery and the Culture of Taste that “the institution of slavery and the culture of taste were fundamental in the shaping of modern identity, and that they did so not apart but as nonidentical twins.” Charleston’s recent—belated—attempts to address the racial violence that underlies the surface are confronted by another, closely associated paradox: that politeness can be its own form of violence. Current legislative moves to limit or flat-out outlaw teaching about race exemplify the kind of “authoritative discourse” that Pierre Bourdieu describes as “condemn[ing] the occupants of dominated positions either to silence or to shocking outspokenness” (191). This essay assesses work by three Black writers—Marcus Amaker, Kwame Dawes, and Nikky Finney—who, in writing about Charleston and South Carolina, have had to find ways to wrestle with the problem of how to make their voices heard without being dismissed as shockingly outspoken.